August 27, 2009
New release for sapnwrfc PHP and Python
Been a busy month, working on the NW SAP RFC connectors. With build help from Menelaos, I now have a working Python build system for Windows on the Python NW RFC Connector as of version 0.07 - this is available here.
Also, with help from Joachim, I've added a static function sapnwrfc_removefunction(<sysid>, <function name>) to the PHP connector that allows the removing of function definitions from the local cache. this is most useful when developing RFC applications in PHP, as you can modify your RFC definition without having to restart the web server everytime. This is available from version 0.09 here.
Posted by PiersHarding at 7:43 AM
August 15, 2009
Auth SAML 2.0 for Mahara
Following on from the SAML 2.0 work that I've done recently for Moodle, I thought it was useful to do the same for the Mahara ePortfolio service, while I was in the same space. Details of the first release can be found here, with tested version for both trunk, and 1.1_STABLE.
Posted by PiersHarding at 9:25 AM
August 3, 2009
Moodle and SAML 2.0 Web SSO
Of late I have been doing a lot of SSO integration work for the NZ Ministry of Education, and during this time I came across an excellent project FEIDE. One of the off shoots of this has been the development of a high quality PHP library for SAML 2.0 Web SSO - SimpleSAMLPHP.
For Moodle integration, Erlend Strømsvik of Ny Media AS, developed an authentication plugin, which I've made a number of changes to around configuration options, and Moodle session integration. This has now been documented and added to Moodle Contrib to give it better visibility to the Moodle community at large. Documentation is here and the contrib entry is here.
Posted by PiersHarding at 8:41 AM
June 28, 2009
Perl sapnwrfc 0.30
I doing some work for a client recently, I got the opportunity to do some major performance work on sapnwrfc for Perl. The net result is that a number of memory leaks, mainly of Perl values not going out of scope properly, have been fixed.
Additionally, I've had some time to put together a proper cookbook style set of examples in the sapnwrfc-cookbook. These examples, while specifically for Perl, are almost identical for sapnwrfc for Python, Ruby, and PHP too.
Posted by PiersHarding at 7:20 AM
April 26, 2009
Dynamic Weather Map
I had once seen on a colleague of mines Mac, a weather widget of New Zealand, that gave him an animated view of the weather situation as seen by the satellite passing over. I had not been able to find this animation on the Met Service website, and was puzzling over where the data was coming from. Then I realised it was staring me in the face in the Infrared series. So - in a bit of retro shell script coding, using GET, perl, convert, and gifsicle, I built my own 
.
Posted by PiersHarding at 6:29 PM